How do we know the Holocaust isn’t a giant hoax?
If you are reading this, you presumably have become curious about the Holocaust and the controversies surrounding “Holocaust denial.” A common reaction to such curiosity is to shame and discourage the inquirer. This hesitance to provide straightforward answers for what are in theory perfectly valid questions can have the unfortunate consequence of causing initial curiosities to develop into serious doubts. The approach taken here will be different. This will be a judgment-free zone. It will not be assumed that the reader is asking questions due to defects of character or sinister motives. What follows will be a concise and readable presentation of the best evidence for the Holocaust for anyone who might be interested. For mildly curious readers, the information to come will likely seem excessive. For the more extreme skeptics, you may not be totally convinced even by the end, in which case this will have to serve merely as a point of departure for further study.
Before diving in, we should set some expectations. No amount of evidence will be convincing to a hyper-skeptic who is set on finding reasons to reject any evidence that might be produced. The volume of evidence supporting the Holocaust – testimonies, documents, and so forth – is objectively speaking vast and generally far greater than what we find for similar mass atrocities. The self-styled Holocaust revisionists as a rule reject most testimonial evidence as worthless and often reject even contemporaneous German documents with speculations of forgery. This tendency to reject whatever evidence is presented is perhaps part of the reason so many refuse to engage with the revisionists.
The standard of proof demanded by the revisionists is well beyond normal, and few genocides or mass atrocities could ever meet such a high bar. Many of the same people will not bat an eye at claims of tens of millions killed under Stalin or Mao. It seems then that the revisionists employ their hyper-skeptical attitude only selectively. If revisionist standards of proof were applied to all genocides and mass atrocities, we would have to reject many allegations of mass violence due to unavoidable gaps in evidence even though we have every reason to think mass violence during war-time is extremely common.
Missing Jews
Perhaps the most natural place to start is by asking whether we can confirm a vast decline in the Jewish population during the war. Prior to the war, estimates for the world Jewish population ranged from 15 to 17 million. Post-1945, estimates dropped to around 11 million, a substantial decrease. Encyclopedias and other general reference works published in the early postwar period sometimes report higher “postwar” figures, and some revisionists have jumped on this as disproving the Holocaust, but these anomalous figures are invariably based on
old prewar data and are therefore worthless.
Official statistics show a large drop, though this may not convince the skeptic who may suspect some sort of numbers game is being played. Certainly the precision of the figures in Eastern Europe can be questioned. And various explanations can be suggested to explain why some Jews might disappear statistically. Some Jews changed their names after the war. Some Jewish children were adopted by Christian families after their parents were deported. Definitions and statistical methodologies differ across countries. But it is hard to lose millions merely due to statistical inconsistencies. And it is even more unlikely that millions were also lost in the migration data. Often even small numbers of Jew refugees were refused entry at ports and borders, so it is unclear how millions would have stowed away unnoticed.
The demographic problem can be forcefully demonstrated with the example of Poland. The 1931 Polish census found 3,113,933 Jews living in Poland. Most authorities put the Jewish population at the start of the war somewhat higher due to population growth during the 1930s. Revisionists like Walter Sanning (the premier revisionist demographer) have attempted to argue for a somewhat lower figure, based on the extremely tenuous assumption of massive Jewish emigration from Poland before the war. But even Sanning’s lowball figure of 2.6 million Jews in Poland does not materially change the picture. We are still starting with roughly three million Polish Jews, and very few of them were still there at the end of the war. A confidential statistical report (the “
Korherr report”) prepared for Himmler based on data through the end of 1942 estimated that the number of Jews in the General Government (the territory corresponding to what was most of Poland) had declined drastically from 2,000,000 to only 297,914. The bulk of this decrease (1,274,166) was delicately attributed to “evacuations.” This is further confirmed by the head of the General Government Hans Frank who remarked in early 1944 that there remained only around 100,000 Jews in the entire General Government (
diary entry, 25 Jan 1944).
While there are many mentions in the German documents of “resettlement” and “evacuations,” there is nothing to explain where these Jews actually went. Arthur Butz, in his “classic” revisionist study, hit a wall at this point, remarking, “While we have a good idea of where these settlements were, we know little else about them other than that they existed,” concluding that the Allies must have “destroyed the relevant German records and documents, so that only scraps survive” (
Butz, 285). The suggestion of the revisionists then is that these millions of Jews were moved vaguely “to the east” and were eventually absorbed by the Soviet Union. The evidence for this was then destroyed by the Allies as part of a cover-up. Subsequent revisionist attempts to develop the resettlement hypothesis by Thomas Kues and others have all hit the same wall that Butz hit. Not even the greatly increased availability of archives in Eastern Europe seems to have helped the revisonists in finding these missing settlements.
A similar point can be made about the Hungarian Jews. According to the traditional history, around 438,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz from May to July of 1944. There are many German documents attesting to this. Arthur Butz, evidently uncomfortable with such a large number of deportations, argued that the German documents must be forgeries, an argument even most revisionists now seem to reject (see e.g.
Mattogno, the last section). Butz, in
an exchange with fellow revisionist Juergen Graf, pointed out that Graf in accepting the high deportation figures leaves himself in a bind because “Graf cannot tell us what happened to most of the 438,000 Jews.” Some indeed were transited through Auschwitz and were sent on for labor in Austria and elsewhere, yet only a small percentage of them were found alive in the camps the following year.
Given that there is no convincing alternative explanation for these millions of missing Jews, nor for the near complete disappearance of the Jews of Poland, this is strong circumstantial evidence in favor of the traditional history. Many readers may be satisfied with this argument alone. For sake of thoroughness, however, we will press forward and consider a selection of the direct evidence for mass killing.
Killings in the East
While it is clear that Hitler had great animosity toward the Jews at least as early as 1919 and was set on removing Jews from Germany, we should not make the mistake of conflating vaguely expressed ideological commitments with practical policy many years later. As early as January 1939, Hitler had publicly threatened to “annihilate” the Jews if they were to incite (from his perspective) another world war. We should not assume, however, that such statements were a reflection of any specific plans at the time. This mistake is common in many early postwar histories of the Third Reich, and this misunderstanding remains common among the general public. Subsequent research by leading academics has established convincingly that the extermination policies evolved more gradually than traditionally supposed. The reader who is unaware of this may well encounter many facts that seem incongruous with an extermination policy, such as German proposals in 1940 to resettle the Jews in Madagascar. The reality is that while there had long been a detectable genocidal impulse among Hitler and the Nazis, this did not immediately crystallize into a practical extermination program.
The killing of Jews began on a large scale after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (“Operation Barbarossa”). The German documents on this are so extensive that even most revisionists must accept substantial parts of this aspect of the history, typically arguing only that the numbers are exaggerated, or attempting to justify or contextualize the killings as a reaction to partisan activity.
There was not a full-on extermination policy at this point, although the distinction between full-on extermination and mass killing was often a very fine one. The
Commissar Order, issued just prior to Barbarossa, ordered that severe measures be taken against the “political commissars” in the battle against Bolshevism. Let’s keep in mind though that in the Nazi mind, “Jew” and “Bolshevist” were virtually synonymous, and there was apparently little concern with false positives. Starting soon after the invasion, the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, the units assigned with rearguard security in the East, speak matter-of-factly of rounding up and shooting Jews on the slightest of suspicions.
- "It is obvious that the cleansing activities have to extend first of all to the Bolsheviks and the Jews." (OSR 10, 10 Jul 1941)
- “Bielsk-Podlaski: Supporting troops have taken over all positions. Party officials have fled. Leaders of Jewish intelligentsia (in particular teachers, lawyers, Soviet officials) liquidated.” (OSR 13, 5 Jul 1941)
- "187 Soviet Russians and Jews turned over by the army, some civilian prisoners, were shot in Zhitomir." (OSR 30, 22 Jul 1941, in Arad, The Einsatzgruppen Reports)
- "In Minsk the entire Jewish intelligentsia has been liquidated (teachers, professors, lawyers, etc., except medical personnel)." (OSR 32, 24 Jul 1941, in Arad)
The policies soon became more severe. The
Reichenau Order of October 1941 called for the destruction of the “Jewish-Bolshevik system” and impressed upon the soldiers “the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.” Himmler himself admitted in multiple speeches that he had ordered the killing to be extended not only to the men but the women and children as well.
Whenever I was forced to take steps against the partisans and Jewish commissars in some village – I’ll say it for the information of this group only – I made it a point to give the order to kill the women and children of these partisans and commissars. I would have been a weakling and I would be committing a crime against our descendants if I allowed the hate-filled sons of the subhumans we have liquidated in this struggle of humanity against subhumanity to grow up. (
Himmler Speech, 16 Dec 1943)
We can see policy evolving toward increasing lethality in for example Franz Rademacher’s inquiry to Adolf Eichmann about the possibility of deporting Serbian Jews to Poland or Russia. Rademacher recorded Eichmann’s response in his notes for September 13, 1941, explaining that “residence in Russia and GG [General Government] is impossible. Not even the Jews in Germany can be lodged there. Eichmann proposes shooting” (Browning,
Path to Genocide, pg. 134).
In many of the Einsatzgruppen reports, it is clear that the Germans sought to encourage local populations to massacre Jews. The intention with this was to spin the killing of the Jews as an organic act of just retribution by the locals who had long suffered under brutal “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Franz Stahlecker in a very long report from October 15, 1941 (
L-180) remarked multiple times on the inadequacy of this strategy of inciting the locals against the Jews.
From the beginning it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the East could not be solved by pogroms alone. In accordance with the basic orders received, however, the cleansing activities of the Security Police had to aim at a complete annihilation of the Jews.
Although the employers aim at replacing Jewish labor with Lithuanian or Latvian labor, it is not yet possible to displace all employed Jews especially not in the larger towns. In co-operation with the labor exchange offices, however, all Jews who are no longer fit for work are being arrested and shall be executed in small batches.
We see here that when Jews were spared it was not out of humanitarian concern but merely for labor or other practical considerations.
The mass shooting of so many civilians including women and children took such a psychological toll on the executioners that Himmler tasked Arthur Nebe, the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, with developing a more impersonal means of killing. This led to the use of mobile killing stations, essentially vans with the cargo box modified to kill the passengers with exhaust fumes (an idea which had some precursors in the euthanasia program, as we will see later). Use of these gas vans was acknowledged in many postwar testimonies such as that of Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppe D (see IMT, Vol 4, pg. 311). There is also at least one surviving war-time document from May 1942, PS-501 (see
Metzner, document 9), which clearly refers to the gas vans. The revisionists when confronted with documents like PS-501 that they cannot explain simply declare them to be forgeries. The latest and greatest revisionist literature seems to have made some attempt to avoid alleging forgery as often as the earlier generations of revisionists, but PS-501 is so explicit that forgery is all they can argue.
One of the largest massacres occurred in a “reprisal” action at Kiev on September 29-30, 1941. The Einsatsgruppen documents record an incredible 33,771 executions over these two days (OSR
101 and
128). These killings were broadly confirmed by the affidavit of Paul Blobel (
NO-3824) and many other testimonies.
During the last days of September 1941 the Sonderkommando 4A in co-operation with the group staff of the Einsatgruppe C and two units of the police regiments stationed in Kiev, carried out the mass execution of Jews in Kiev.
I think that the figure of 33, 771 mentioned to me as the number of persons executed in Kiev is too high. In my opinion not more than half of the mentioned figures were shot.
Notice that Blobel was permitted to dispute the figure as too high. If the revisionists are correct that all these statements were coerced and scripted by the Allies, we can only wonder why the defendants were free to push back against the allegations.
The Evolution of the Extermination Camps
Before getting to the famed extermination camps, it’s necessary to provide some background on the German euthanasia program which served as a clear precursor. Like the Einsatzgruppen shootings, the euthanasia program is another aspect of the story that is generally too well documented to be seriously disputed. There exists an official Hitler order (PS-630, dated September 1, 1939) authorizing the program at the start of the war. The belief was that those with severe mental and physical disabilities were “unworthy of life” and were a burden on the German Volk. Methods of execution varied at the euthanasia “hospitals,” but there is good evidence that carbon monoxide gassing was among these methods. The medical personnel involved stated this at their trials (e.g., NMT Case I). As Dr. Karl Bradt explained,
Adolf Hitler asked me which method, based on current considerations and experiences, was the mildest, that is to say the safest, quickest and the most effective and painless one. I had to concede that this was death through the inhalation of carbon monoxide gas. He then said that this was also the most humane. I myself then took on board this position and put to one side my medical concerns for external reasons… I am convinced that the procedure with carbon monoxide was right. (see
Wear)
It is not clear what reason there would be for numerous German doctors to coordinate in lying about this. Some revisionists such as John Wear (previous link) have conceded the carbon monoxide gassings. Many other revisionists are reluctant to concede the euthanasia gassings even though arguably the method is relatively humane. The obvious reason for the reluctance is that revisionists know that admitting to any gassings at all would undermine their broader position that the gas chamber stories were entirely legendary.
In addition to the testimonial evidence, there is circumstantial evidence of bottled carbon monoxide being delivered to the euthanasia centers. There is even a German film script from 1942 that references the gassings quite explicitly (see
Metzner).
It was inevitable that the logic of the euthanasia program would eventually be applied to the detested Jews. A Dr. Wetzel, in a draft letter from October 1941 (
NO-365), makes reference to a “gassing apparatus” in connection with Dr. Viktor Brack, a key man in the euthanasia program, and states further that “there are no objections against doing away with those Jews who are not able to work with the Brack remedy.” Another document survives of this same Brack expressing a plan to sterilize the small fraction of Jews in Europe who might be spared for labor.
Among 10 millions of Jews, in Europe are, I figure, at least 2-3 millions of men and women, who are fit enough for work. Considering the extraordinary difficulties the labor problem presents us with, I hold the view that these 2-3 millions should be specially selected and preserved. This can however only be done, if at the same time they are rendered incapable to propagate. About a year ago I reported to you that agents of mine have completed the experiments necessary for this purpose. (Brack to Himmler, 23 Jun 1942,
NO-205)
Brack was confronted with this document at trial, and he did not dispute the authenticity of it.
The euthanasia methods would soon be applied to the nagging issue of what to do with the Jews in the Warthegau region. Arthur Greiser, the head of the Warthegau, had hoped to unload his Jews on the General Government, but Hans Frank objected strongly to this proposal. This conflict between Greiser and Frank continued unresolved, leading Greiser to confine the Jews to the Lodz ghetto as a stop-gap measure. The situation was becoming serious as there was doubt over whether the Jews could be maintained through the winter. Rolf-Heinz Höppner of the Emigration Central Office remarked in a memo to Eichmann,
This winter there is a danger that not all the Jews can be fed anymore. One should weigh honestly, if the most humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not employable by means of some quick-working device. At any rate, that would be more pleasant than to let them starve to death. (Memo, 16 Jul 1941, quoted in Montague, Chelmno and the Holocaust, pg. 37)
In December 1941, a solution was reached. A camp was established at Chelmno, the first of the extermination camps. The founding commandant of Chelmno was one Herbert Lange, a veteran of the euthanasia program who had exactly the “quick-working device” that was needed. The year prior, one of the jobs of Lange and his detachment was to handle the “evacuation” of 1,558 mental patients in East Prussia (
NO-2909, also NO-2908, NO-2911). According to witnesses, as early as December of 1939, Lange was tasked with developing mobile killing operations so that patients would not always have to be transported to the euthanasia centers. Lange developed a gas van for this purpose that used bottled carbon monoxide. (For background on Lange, see Montague, pg. 16-22). The gas vans at Chelmno later switched to an exhaust gas method, as was used on the Eastern front. Most secondary sources describe only vans with the exhaust gas design in connection with Chelmno. Curiously enough, however, one of the earliest reports out of Chelmno from an escapee in 1942 confirms the older carbon monoxide design which was used briefly in the early days of the camp.
In addition to the circumstantially incriminating background of Lange, we also have a damning German document from June 1942 which states, “Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed for example, using three vans, without any defects showing up in the vehicles.” (See
Metzner, document 10, the “Just document”). Yet another forgery, according to the revisionists.
As further confirmation, the Korherr report (the statistical report prepared for Himmler mentioned earlier) records that 145,301 Jews were sent “through the camp at Warthegau,” i.e., Chelmno. The head of the Warthegau, Arthur Greiser, in a May 1942 letter to Himmler (
NO-246), referenced the planned "special treatment of about 100,000 Jews" in his district which Himmler had approved, and he told Himmler this could be "completed within the next 2-3 months."
The Final Solution
It is not known with certainty when Hitler issued a general extermination order against the Jews. No such written order has survived, a point of tremendous overemphasis among revisionists. It is likely that Hitler began leaning toward a more radical policy in late 1941, with the declaration of war against the United States in December very possibly serving as a catalytic event. As the Jews had, in Hitler’s mind, now pushed the United States into a war with Germany, it was now time to make good on his promise to annihilate them.
At the start of 1942, though huge numbers of Jews had been shot in the eastern territories, Germany still had a large number of Jews, particularly in the General Government. To address this, a program code-named Operation Reinhardt was established, headed by Odilo Globocnik. Three camps were set up along the eastern border of the General Government. As with Herbert Lange at Chelmno, many Reinhardt personnel were drawn from the euthanasia program. Mass deportations started in March to Belzec and in the summer to Sobibor and Treblinka. A
decrypted telegram intercepted by the British confirms that 1,274,166 Jews were deported, with nearly all being sent to the three Reinhardt camps (with a small number going to Majdanek). The evacuation figure in the Korherr report is identical to the figure in the decrypted telegram.
The Warsaw Ghetto provides a vivid illustration of the liquidation of Polish Jewry. There were at one point over 400,000 Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto. Most were sent to Treblinka. There were only some 56,000 Jews remaining at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which started in April 1943. SS Police Leader Juergen Stroop led the destruction of the ghetto following the uprising, as recounted in a long and detailed report (
PS-1061). Of particular interest is Stroop’s comment on exterminations.
Of the total 56,065 Jews caught, about 7,000 were exterminated within the former Ghetto in the course of the large-scale action, and 6,929 by transporting them to T.II, which means 14,000 Jews exterminated altogether. (Stroop Report, pg. 8)
“T.II” is a common name for Treblinka II, the extermination camp at Treblinka, as distinct from the labor camp at Treblinka I.
Most of the German documentation related to Operation Reinhardt was deliberately destroyed. The best reconstruction of events based on postwar interrogations and survivor testimony established that all three camps were killing centers with stationary gas chambers that used engine exhaust. By the end of 1942, the General Government was largely cleared of Jews. Goebbels commented on Operation Reinhardt in his private diary (27 Mar 1942).
Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.
The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention. A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophecy which the Fuehrer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime would have the strength for such a global solution of this question. Here, too, the Fuehrer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitated by conditions and therefore inexorable. Fortunately a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.
It requires very strained assumptions indeed to render the above passage innocuous. Revisionist Juergen Graf has conceded, “No revisionist has ever been able to furnish a satisfactory explanation for this passage” (see
Argument 3). David Irving likewise admitted in 1992 (during his peak revisionist period) that it’s “a very ugly passage.” Prior to the 1990s, questions could be raised regarding the authenticity of the diaries. Such concerns were largely settled, however, with the discovery of the glass negatives in the Russian archives. It was already known that Goebbels had had his voluminous diaries photographed onto glass negatives for preservation (similar in concept to microfilm) and that these records were captured by the Russians. Irving, after reviewing the long-neglected glass plates in Moscow in 1992
concluded “there’s no way anyone could have faked it.”
Many SS men such as
Franz Stangl later confessed to involvement in the killings at the Reinhardt camps. Polish villagers around the camps also gave statements describing the horrors they witnessed such as this statement from Maria Damiel.
We could see a machine that took out the corpses from the graves and threw them into the fire. There were a few such fires going simultaneously. At that time a dreadful smell dominated the whole area, a smell of burned human bones and bodies. From the moment they began burning the corpses, from all directions of the camp came the smell of the corpses. When the Germans completed the burning of the corpses, they dismantled the camp. (Arad, The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, pg. 214)
Broader confirmation of an extermination program can be seen in the speeches of Himmler.
I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to do the duty we were bidden and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. [...]
I mean the evacuation of the Jews (die Judenevakuierung), the extermination (Ausrottung) of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about, ‘The Jewish race is being exterminated [ausgerottet],’ says one Party Member, ‘that’s quite clear, it’s in our program – elimination (Ausschaltung) of the Jews and we’re doing it, extermination (Ausrottung) is what we’re doing.’ [...] This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if with the bombing raids, the burdens and the depravations of war we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and trouble-mongers. (Speech at Posen, 4 Oct 1943, PS-1919)
Many revisionists have attempted to deal with the Posen speech by (predictably) declaring it a forgery. That so many of them feel the need to argue this is an implicit admission that it is incriminating. Arthur Butz argued for forgery in his book, noting that alternatively one might attempt to neutralize the document by assuming “extermination” refers to something less drastic than killing, but he ultimately concluded (very sensibly) that “while such an argument could be made, it would not be very solid” (Butz, pg. 257). Indeed, if Himmler were merely referring to deportations or something along those lines, there would be little reason to speak of it as a dark secret.
That brings us to Auschwitz, the most famous and notorious of the Nazi camps. Auschwitz was the largest of the concentration camps and had a large inmate population, by no means only Jews, and it was of considerable industrial importance. This hybrid character of the camp incidentally has led to considerable confusion as many assume it was a pure extermination facility. According to witnesses, limited gassings began at Auschwitz in late 1941. As part of the final solution, in 1942, Auschwitz began receiving transports of Jews from various countries, most of whom were liquidated on arrival. In the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the construction of four large crematory buildings at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) with a total of 12 furnaces and 46 retorts. No other concentration camp was equipped with anywhere near this number of ovens.
By 1944, the Reinhard camps had shut down and Auschwitz was left as the primary killing site. The peak killing period at Auschwitz came after Hungary fell under German occupation. Starting in May of 1944, most of the Jews outside Budapest, more than 400,000 people, were sent to Auschwitz with only a fraction surviving.
Just before his death, Hitler would reflect on the suffering he had exacted upon the Jews whom he blamed for the war.
But I left no doubt about the fact that the real culprit in this murderous struggle, Jewry, would also have to pay for it, if the people of Europe were again to be treated as so many packages of shares by these international money and finance conspirators. Furthermore, I left no doubt that it would not be tolerated this time that millions of European children of the Aryan people should starve to death, that millions of grown-up men should suffer death, and that hundreds of thousands of women and children should be burnt and bombed to death in the cities, without the real culprit suffering his due punishment, even though through more humane methods. (Hitler,
Last Will and Political Testament)
Surely if the Jews were responsible for such vast suffering, they deserved to pay with their own lives and nothing less.
The Gas Chambers
I would be remiss if I did not address some points over which the reader may have some lingering doubts. What about the gas chambers? Is there hard proof these existed? Could millions of people have been killed in these chambers? The gas chambers are a point of major obsession among the revisionists. The traditional histories, as they are not intended to be technical treatises on gas chambers, generally dedicate minimal space to the intricacies involved, usually providing only a brief description sourced from testimonies. Revisionists hunt for inaccuracies and contradictions in the gas chamber accounts in order to declare the testimonies to be fabrications. They also enjoy delving into arcane forensic details, as is typical with conspiracy theorists. The mainstream, finding the historical evidence amply convincing and seeing little proof of the Jews surviving, has generally seen no reason to indulge the revisionists in their technical theorizing. Naturally, revisionists see this as proof of a massive cover-up.
First of all, while extensive technical documentation of the gas chambers is lacking, it is not the case that the evidence is entirely testimonial. As already mentioned, there are multiple surviving gas van documents that are reasonably explicit (PS-501 and the Just document). Regarding the stationary gas chambers, while the documents are generally not quite as explicit, there is one document (NO-4473) that suggestively refers to a
Vergasungskeller (“gassing cellar”) in connection with one of the Birkenau crematoria. More on that to come.
A major step forward in research on the gas chambers came in the 1980s with the work of the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac. Pressac started out as a revisionist, but his research at Auschwitz and other camps convinced him the gas chambers were real. Pressac was at times scathing toward the mainstream for their lack of technical competence, and it is perfectly true that the concentration camp museums and other mainstream bodies have not always been careful about technical details. For example, the Natzweiler-Struthof camp gassings have traditionally been said to have been done by pouring Zyklon B granules into a funnel with a tap for liquids, an arrangement Pressac scornfully dismissed as physically impossible. Pressac felt such sloppiness opened up the mainstream to easy attacks by revisionists like Robert Faurisson: “A person such as Faurisson was born from these excesses.” However, over time Pressac became even more critical of the revisionists and their own dogmatic tendencies.
One of the traditional stories from Struthof is that a Dr. Hirt wanted a collection of Jewish skeletons for his research. A request was sent to Auschwitz to have 86 Jews sent over to Struthof where they were killed. To the skeptic, this story will surely sound fantastic, but that they were sent there and were killed is surprisingly well documented. Even Juergen Graf admits, “The documents do not permit any doubt in this regard” (
Mattogno, pg. 20). There is not only paper evidence establishing the request, there are even
photos of the corpses at the Strasbourg University Anatomical Institute. Carlo Mattogno goes even further than Graf, “My conclusion, therefore, is that the 86 Jews were indeed murdered at Natzweiler, most probably by means of gas, but in an existing gas chamber that had been built for experiments with phosgene gas” (Mattogno, pg. 220).
If we concede euthanasia gassings and the Struthof gassings, and we accept the documentation on the gas vans, this already severely undercuts the revisionist premise that the gas chambers were mythical.
Pressac also did extensive research at Auschwitz and published many previously unknown documents in his 1989 book, including many showing that gas-tight doors, gas detectors, and other suggestive features were installed in the crematorium cellars. Pressac called these features “criminal traces.” His work in many ways was a continuation of the earlier debate over the Vergasungskeller document. Arthur Butz has spoken frankly over the years about the difficulties revisionists have had in finding an explanation for the Vergasungkeller. The traditional revisionist understanding was that the crematorium cellars were simply morgues, as indicated on the original blueprints. Butz’s first explanation of the Vergasungskeller from back in the 1970s (admittedly based on limited sources) was that the “gassing cellar” was perhaps a “gas generation cellar” for the cremation ovens (Butz, pg. 169). The documents later published in Pressac’s book showed that this speculative interpretation was wrong since the ovens were fueled with a direct supply of coke. In reply, Butz suggested with noticeable desperation that the “gas generation cellar” was perhaps located in some other unmentioned building! The mental gymnastics on display here indicate that Butz was extremely reluctant to admit that the room traditionally identified as the homicidal gas chamber was referred to by the Germans as a “gassing cellar.” And it is obvious why he did not want to admit this as surely this is too great of a coincidence.
In 1996, Butz, still uneasy about the problem, did a full 180 and finally conceded that the notorious cellar in question was indeed the “Vergasungskeller,” but he argued that it was thus referred to because the cellar doubled as a gas shelter during air raids (Butz, Supplement 5). This line of argument has been taken up by Samuel Crowell and others, but unfortunately they have struggled to convince even other revisionists of this bomb shelter hypothesis. Notably, none other than Carlo Mattogno has strongly objected on the grounds that there is no indication of such air defense measures being taken at Auschwitz until later in the war. Mattogno’s favored theory is that there were plans (never implemented) to use the cellars for fumigations. The most natural conclusion by far remains that the cellar was called a gassing cellar and had gas-tight doors, etc., simply because it was a gas chamber for killing people, exactly as has always been understood.
Coincident with Pressac’s research, revisionists had begun their attacks on the gas chambers on forensic grounds, a focus that has continued till the present. A watershed moment for the revisionists occurred in 1988 with the publication of the “Leuchter Report.” Leuchter at the time was billed as America’s foremost engineer on execution technologies and worked as a consultant for prisons. The Zundel team hired him to go to Poland and give his expert opinion on the gas chambers there. Leuchter concluded that the gas chambers were obvious fakes and that the facilities in question could in no way be used for gassings. The most influential part of the report was that Leuchter took unauthorized samples from the walls and sent them to a lab for testing. Leuchter’s headline finding was that the homicidal gas chambers had at best trace levels of cyanide in stark contrast to the fumigation chambers which showed high cyanide levels, often with visible blue staining. The report was enough to persuade David Irving who testified on Zundel’s behalf and who helped get Leuchter’s report published in English.
So does that settle it? Did Leuchter scientifically debunk the gas chambers?
As it turns out, Leuchter had no training in engineering (he had a bachelor’s in history), and subsequent revisionists have acknowledged the technical deficiencies of his report. Even worse, according to leading revisionist chemist Germar Rudolf, the report was in all probability ghostwritten by Robert Faurisson (a professor of literature!), and Leuchter merely lent his name to it (see Rudolf
interview with Jim Rizoli, 2 May 2022, starting around 41:00). Rudolf himself found the Leuchter report so wanting that he took new (unauthorized) samples and wrote his own report without all the discrediting blunders in the Leuchter/Faurisson report.
The technical details of the ensuing debate over cyanide levels and Rudolf’s material cannot be satisfactorily addressed here. But briefly, it is true that Zyklon B can react with iron in the walls, sometimes forming blue stains, and that the homicidal gas chambers, to the extent that these are still standing, generally do not seem to have this staining. But the chemical reactions in question require many conditions to align, so a lack of the blue staining does not preclude Zyklon B usage. Not all fumigation chambers have blue staining (Dachau, for example) even though we can be confident Zyklon B was used in those chambers. It is also likely that dedicated fumigation chambers would have had much longer exposure to the gas than chambers used for executing humans. Humans die relatively quickly from cyanide gassing, and the most intensively used chambers in the two large Birkenau crematoria had ventilation systems which would have greatly sped up the removal of the gas. Again, the details are too complex to address here, but it will suffice to say that the Leuchter/Faurisson/Rudolf tests are in no way conclusive and are nowhere near enough to overturn the wealth of historical evidence.
Easy Targets
As a final note, it should be admitted that there have been many dubious claims related to the Holocaust, and there is sometimes a hesitance to advertise this too loudly so as to avoid giving ammo to the revisionists. Some Holocaust survivors have proved to be phonies. Many witness statements contain exaggerations and hearsay. Many false and sensational atrocity stories circulated during the war. The investigations in the immediate postwar were often propagandistic. In particular, the Soviet claim that 4 million people were killed at Auschwitz was a preposterous exaggeration. The American newsreel footage of Dachau and other concentration camps has long been presented to the public in a somewhat misleading way. We could go on attacking these easy targets ad nauseum. But we must be careful not to draw sweeping conclusions based on points that are only of minimal historiographical importance. It should come as no shock to anyone that the Soviet investigative bodies were not especially reliable. But it is a mistake to think that just because their Auschwitz figure was wildly exaggerated that this implies that nothing bad happened at Auschwitz. A bit of propaganda and exaggeration from the Allies and from Jews does not mean that the Nazis were innocent!
Funny enough, many of these easy targets had been revised by mainstream authors decades ago. Gerald Reitlinger emphatically rejected the Soviet figures in his 1953 book. Raul Hilberg did the same in his 1961 book. Hilberg also dismissed the rumor that Jews were made into soap. Not all commentators have been so circumspect (especially those in mass media), but the more sensible and careful scholars have long been more rigorous than revisionists would ever give them credit for.
Conclusion
It has been shown that Jews were rounded up and deported to a small number of camps and that their whereabouts thereafter cannot be satisfactorily explained by revisionists. And it has been shown that there is a wealth of testimonial and documentary evidence explaining what happened to them. This should be more than enough to convince any reasonable person.
If we have a regime known to be strongly anti-Semitic, if we know they gathered up Jews and sent them off to unknown locations, if we have large population drops, and if everyone involved says they were killed, then that is almost certainly what happened. The alternative explanation of a massive hoax would have required falsification of demographic and immigration data, tons of coordinated false testimony, and mass forgery of documents.
